Saturday, April 28, 2012

Huh?

… Logical thought causes less religious belief | COSMOS magazine.


This article never defines what is meant by "logical thinking" and equates it with "analytical thinking." Now, one must use logic to analyze something but analysis and logic are not the same thing. Moreover, strictly speaking, intuition is not "gut feeling." It is an immediate grasp of something, such as your own existence, without having to arrive at it by reasoning about it. Of course, I suppose I'm being altogether too logical about this. Anyway, both Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine provide plenty of evidence in their work that they had a sound grasp of logic — far better than is on evidence in this article. But it doesn't seem to have increased their disbelief. But that could also be because they could distinguish between belief and faith. 
I also wonder if the disbelief doesn't come from having thought about something for the first time. I knew kids in Catholic grade school who started having doubts about their faith as if they were the only people who had ever done so. Their doubt ran well ahead of their ability to reason.
My own experience has been that the clearer your thinking the less certain you are of most things.

1 comment:

  1. Seems like a lot of vague definitions that lead to category errors. So much for trying to clarify things! LOL

    And there's no direct cause and effect between using analytical thinking and losing faith. That's a category error to be sure.

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